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On community, communities and identity politicshttps://sparrowsandnightingales.com/2018/09/18/on-community-communities-and-identity-politics/
https://sparrowsandnightingales.com/2018/09/18/on-community-communities-and-identity-politics/#respondTue, 18 Sep 2018 20:09:54 +0000http://sparrowsandnightingales.com/?p=2062Continue reading "On community, communities and identity politics"]]>Today I drove half an hour to a hospital, with my toddler, to visit a dying woman I barely knew personally, just because she is a member of the church I attend. I don’t want a medal or anything; I mention the incident because it left me mulling over the different ways our culture uses the word ‘community’, and what they mean in practice in different contexts.

In the context of a church, ‘community’ means shared values. In that context, people go the extra mile to care for one another in ways that are shaped by the church’s shared value system. Specifically, visiting a dying woman, that might mean reading her a prayer or sharing with her thoughts and prayers sent by other members of the community. It might mean being willing to hold the hand of a near stranger, knowing she is part of my community and that enough of what remained unspoken between us could be taken for granted for her to find my presence comforting, and to allow me to be present.

In the context of identity politics, where nowadays we more often hear the word ‘community’, what does it in fact mean? It means you share your ‘identity’ with other members of your ‘community’, and membership of that community confers some kind of victim points, which can be leveraged for political amplification, or simply to win an argument with someone who possesses fewer protected characteristics than you. It is no guarantor of shared values, obligations, narratives or really anything much. And the more ‘inclusive’ each ‘community’ gets, the less able any community is to argue a coherent political case for anything. The LGB community is a case in point: when it focused on advocacy for people who sometimes or always engage in same-sex relationships it was pretty straightforward, but now it’s supposed to be an umbrella for everyone except the most vanilla heterosexual sex-role-stereotype-embodying people it’s hard to see what it can actually advocate for. (I wrote about how inclusivity kills politics here.)

This postmodern sense of ‘community’ can’t be relied on to come sit by your deathbed, turn up with food when someone else in the community has a baby, visit you when you’re ill or give you a lift to the station if you’re stuck at home. For that, you need shared values. It’s here I think we start to get a clue as to why the revolutionary vanguard of identity politics sounds increasingly religious with every passing day, complete with catechisms (‘trans women are women’), a theodicy (‘privilege’) and an Inquisition (outsourced to Twitter). It’s because, having left a smoking crater where Christianity once sat, the left-liberal vanguard has (unconsciously perhaps) begun to realise how many babies (and dying old people) have been thrown out with the bathwater.

So I voted Leave. Once a passionate pro-European, my disillusionment was gradual and culminated in utter horror at the harrowing of Greece during the financial crisis. At the most basic level I felt that the EU was/is ultimately doomed to fail because it does not have popular support. I felt (& feel) staying in & struggling to help make it work was a huge instance of the sunk cost fallacy & fixing that was worth taking a hit in the short term.

During the ref campaign I was the only person I knew willing to argue on FB for Leave. Everyone else in my circle was Remain & I lost a fair few friends. I’m not whining; I want to draw a parallel with what’s happening right now in the campaign against self-ID, bear with me. Being against gender self-ID in ‘polite society’ feels very like being for Leave did during the referendum (& indeed still does). Nice People Like Us don’t hold those views. Granted, trans twitchhunts are more savage than Remainer ones but the groupthink & suppression are similar. Now, I know some gender critical ppl are also #FBPE types & will not relish this analogy. But Remain lost partly b/c Remainers underestimated the strength of popular anti-EU feeling. And I’m saying take heart on the self-ID cause because transactivism is making the same mistake.

Transactivism lives in a tiny woke bubble, reinforced by blocking dissenting views on social media & swarming to vilify, silence & eliminate alternate views. So it has a hugely inflated sense of how well supported it is – like Ed Miliband’s Labour govt, or the Remain campaign. And like the Leave campaign, the real resistance to transactivism will come from people who don’t spend a huge amount of time on Twitter, but whose voices will, in the end, be heard. The silent majority will stand with the radfems on this issue. I’m 100% certain of it. So if you’re gender critical, be cheerful: the common sense majority agrees with you. Self-ID is nonsense. And everything you do to reach out beyond activist circles will help your cause. This issue isn’t getting popular resistance because many ordinary ppl are still oblivious.

Just to be clear: I am not saying being gender critical is like being a Leaver, or any bollocks about right or wrong sides of history. I don’t believe in historical progress. But transactivism is in a sense the same kind of liberal high water mark as the EU. Wanting ordinary ppl to bin the ideas of male and female in the name of some sunlit upland of ‘progress’ is an even bigger ask than wanting them to bin national identities. Resistance is being traduced as reactionary in a similar way. But resistance will be similarly implacable.

As a final note, though, Remain lost the referendum – but, with the entire cultural establishment on its side, it is winning the war. While campaigners against transgenderism may take heart from the fact that we have popular opinion on our side (however niche the issue may appear to many averagely apolitical people) it’s clear from Remain’s remarkably effective and sustained post-referendum rearguard action against the implementation of Brexit that pushing popular opinion against the enlightened views of the cultural establishment can take some doing.

]]>https://sparrowsandnightingales.com/2018/07/12/why-transactivists-will-fail-like-remain-but-may-yet-succeed-like-remain-too/feed/2sebastianmaryWhy gender critical feminists must hold their noses and stand with Tommy Robinsonhttps://sparrowsandnightingales.com/2018/05/08/why-gender-critical-feminists-must-hold-their-noses-and-stand-with-tommy-robinson/
https://sparrowsandnightingales.com/2018/05/08/why-gender-critical-feminists-must-hold-their-noses-and-stand-with-tommy-robinson/#respondTue, 08 May 2018 19:58:12 +0000http://sparrowsandnightingales.com/?p=2046Continue reading "Why gender critical feminists must hold their noses and stand with Tommy Robinson"]]>Last Sunday, thousands marched through London in support of freedom of speech. You wouldn’t know it to look at most national papers. The rally featured a range of speakers including libertarian-left Scot ‘Count Dankula’ (best known for being convicted and fined for teaching his girlfriend’s pug to perform a Nazi salute on video) along with alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and former EDL leader, Tommy Robinson.

The mealy-mouthed phrase ‘Oh of course I believe in freedom of speech, but…’ is heard ever more often among those who wish to be seen as nice, progressive, normal and appropriately leftish. And as it creeps further into normal language, it is increasingly not just those on the fringes of the Overton window who fall victim to the ever narrower definition of what is and is not acceptable speech to make freely.

Having mobilised free speech arguments to challenge the status quo from the 1960s onwards, the New Left has by now (for all that it lost the economic one) comprehensively won the culture war. But, having won, the New Left has gone on to develop an ideological immune system to consolidate that victory, and to prevent any insurgent ideas from threatening its hegemony.

One might characterise this immune system as a determined collective capacity to ignore, mock, smear, misrepresent, delegitimise and where necessary deploy more forceful methods of silencing any voice on the fringes of public discourse that challenges its orthodoxies. Adherence to these orthodoxies is enforced – on pain of expulsion from ‘polite society’ – every bit as pervasively as was regular churchgoing once upon a time. Nowhere is this more clear than in the trans juggernaut.

Not content with its admirable achievements in promoting equal treatment for all humans regardless of race, sex or faith, the New Left continues on a relentless pursuit of personal ‘liberation’ for each individual from all restraints of social convention, faith or even pragmatic common sense. Lately, it transpires, we must all go even further, and be liberated even from settled biological fact: men can be female, and women male; all humans must be freed to transcend their own embodied state, to be whatever they feel they are. To gainsay any individual’s personal identity is, now, to commit an act of intensely personal and cruel violence against an individual’s very sense of self and freedom.

The majority of the left sees this straightforwardly in terms of the next civil rights struggle, now that the one for lesbian and gay equality has been won. It is not enough that we have the Gender Recognition Act, which attempts to balance the right to gender self-expression against the rights of women and children to single-sex spaces. Rather trans activism seeks to force into accepted orthodoxy the notion that biological sex is meaningless, and instead all individuals have a ‘gender identity’, which can be changed in law by a simple administrative procedure (I’ve written about this here).

Women who dare ask questions about how this will impact sex discrimination regulations, gendered violence data gathering, pay gap data gathering, women’s shelters, prisons or changing rooms must be treated as though this new shibboleth is already orthodoxy: they must be silenced, utterly. Doxxing, threats of violence, physical assaults, lobbying Parliament to have the phrase ‘trans-identified male’ reclassified as hate crime are some of the tactics in common use. Mumsnet – one of the few online spaces where critical discussion around transgender activism is not heavily moderated – has seen its advertisers targeted by trans activism keen to pressure Mumsnet into implementing a more forceful moderation policy.

Women are being silenced. Left-wing women. Nowhere is this more painfully clear than in the push to deplatform Linda Bellos, a veteran lesbian feminist and founder of Black History Month. The mechanisms employed are the same ones as are used to silence other wicked, excluded voices: smears, harassment, and – wherever possible – the levers of law, power, government. And, because the left long since abandoned its previous spirited defence of free speech in favour of protecting its cultural victories via a policy of selected censorship (‘curated speech’ instead of free speech) left-wing women now have no defence against these parasites hollowing out liberation politics for their own purposes. Those feminists protesting at the female-bodied collateral damage that is starting to pile up up in the cause of freeing men to ‘be women’ are instead facing, at the hands of their former comrades on the left, the same tactics that the left has long since used to consolidate its cultural hegemony.

I shan’t quote anyone directly, but I see the hurt, frustration and rage boiling up. ‘What the fuck do you mean, we’re on the wrong side of history???’. How fucking dare you other, marginalise, smear, delegitimise us, who have so long been dutiful soldiers in the noble cause?

And yet, there it is: without the free speech argument, this will continue. It will get worse. The purges will continue within the left. Maybe we’ll see new orthodoxies starting to creep in that don’t even sound very left-wing at all, but can be justified with reference to liberation, equality, discrimination.

I decided to take this out of my replies to some tweets and do a thread because this ‘Paedophile Manifesto’ is so chilling it needs its own analysis and exposure. I’m only half way through as it is just making me so angry.

I was passed a ‘Paedophile Manifesto’ entitled ‘The handbook’ published 2015 on https://t.co/dIh6IunAPd to have a look at. It spends pages and pages talking about how to normalise what they refer to as ‘Adult-Child Sexual Relationships’. pic.twitter.com/o4RwegIksc

Look, I get it. If you’re a gender-critical feminist, you’re possibly a radical feminist. You’re 99.9999999% likely to be pretty left-wing. The cultural revolution is your baby. But babies grow up, and without checks and balances this one’s growing up mean.

The no-platforming, harassment, mockery, ostracism starts out being just for people you don’t like, and don’t agree with. So you don’t speak up. Then they’re gunning for people you thought were basically okay, but maybe you were wrong and anyway you’re afraid to speak out in case you get blowback. Then, suddenly, they’re coming for people a whole lot like you, to stifle an issue you actually really care about.

This isn’t just about saving women from a misogynistic campaign to abolish legal recognition of sex differences in the name of a spurious freedom to ape the behavioural stereotypes imposed on the opposite sex. It’s about retaining, for the left, the ability to save the left from itself – an ability that looks worryingly to be already hanging by a thread. Gender critical feminists are the canaries in the left-wing coalmine. Without a spirited defence of free speech – yes, even for Tommy Robinson – the left will incrementally be taken over by and for interests a long way from the oppressed, the powerless, the voiceless whom the left claim to wish to represent, lift up and defend. Misogynists; paedophiles; those who seek to reintroduce blasphemy laws. It’s all coming.

Gender critical feminists: this is bigger even than a battle to keep the rights women have won. It’s a fight for the soul of liberation politics. Without a spirited left-wing defence of free speech – and let’s face it, this is a pretty radical suggestion nowadays – the left is a sitting duck. For while its immune system is effective at purging antagonists, it is defenceless against parasites. Transgenderism is just the first of many ideological parasites: it has already colonised most mainstream LGB lobby groups. More will follow, each dripping with the magic aura of liberation, open-mindedness, toleration, equality, justice, inclusion and an end to discrimination. Opposing these parasites will mean falling foul of the prohibition on any thought, speech or action that can be painted as discriminatory, intolerant, exclusionary or bigoted.

The only such defence that stands the test of time is the free speech defence, and that means defending it even for those whose views we dislike. It’s time to hold your noses and stand with Tommy Robinson.

]]>https://sparrowsandnightingales.com/2018/05/08/why-gender-critical-feminists-must-hold-their-noses-and-stand-with-tommy-robinson/feed/0sebastianmaryDon’t care about gender Self-ID? Here’s why you shouldhttps://sparrowsandnightingales.com/2018/04/30/dont-care-about-gender-self-id-heres-why-you-should/
https://sparrowsandnightingales.com/2018/04/30/dont-care-about-gender-self-id-heres-why-you-should/#commentsMon, 30 Apr 2018 15:43:38 +0000http://sparrowsandnightingales.com/?p=2037Continue reading "Don’t care about gender Self-ID? Here’s why you should"]]>A quick post on the Government’s proposed changes to the law around sex/gender reassignment to make it easier for transgender people to become legally the opposite sex. I won’t go into the feminist objections to these changes, as numerous excellent writers and organisations already summarise this (see here for plenty of links).

Many have ignored the debate so far, seeing it as an arcane internecine spat on the left and good for a chuckle or two, nothing more. But changes to the law on trans issues affect everyone. If you care at all about personal liberty and (relative) freedom from government overreach, here are two reasons why you should oppose ‘self-ID’: firstly, it’s a monstrous power grab by a government already giddy and bloated with the powers it increasingly clutches to itself. And secondly, if this goes through we might as well have done with it and just reinstate blasphemy laws.

It’s a massive government power grab: Effectively the changes replace sex with ‘gender identity’. So what, you might say. But sex is observable: even without peering at genitals humans can identify with near-perfect accuracy whether another human is male or female. Even my 18-month-old can do it and she’s only just learned the words for ‘man’ and ‘lady’. But once someone can declare themselves legally ‘male’ or ‘female’ simply by filling in a form, based on no external factors whatsoever and simply their feeling about what they are, sex stops being an observable property of everyone’s physical selves and becomes ‘gender identity’, an abstract property of everyone’s inner life. At that moment the final arbiter of who is or isn’t male or female stops being the evidence of your and everyone else’s eyes.

In order for ‘gender identity’ to have any meaning, therefore, it needs to be ratified by – guess who? Enter your friendly bureaucratic state. The government will have abolished your sex and given you something called a ‘gender identity’ instead, to which of course only the government can give binding force.

Michael Merrick’s brilliant essay The Labour Family sets out how the same radically individualist concept of ‘liberty’ – articulated on the right in the economic sphere and on the left in the social – placed the state in direct competition with social structures, networks and traditions as the prime means of individuals’ support.

For liberty to flourish the state had to remain neutral toward the conduct of those residing within it. It could dispense justice where contracts were unjustly breached, but the manner in which they were drawn, the manner in which they ended, and the manner in which they affected third parties and society as a whole remained outside the purview of the state. Yet it also needed vigorous protection and a legislative commitment to mitigate the fallout from such self-centred accounts of freedom. This put the state in direct competition with that supportive web of relationships that traditionally regulated individual behaviour as well as helped absorb fallout when required. In providing an alternative to these networks, in rendering associative, reciprocal, mutualistic society no longer at the core of individual progress and preservation, the state had begun to monopolise the space where society used to be. The result was corrosive to any sort of relational politics; a system with a focus on outcomes, as Ruth Porter explains, ‘removes any connection between action and consequence. In doing so, it destroys the very reflex which encourages moral action. By consequence, this breeds a sense of entitlement. This undermines social bonds both in families and also communities more broadly.’

The paradox in the dynamic outlined above is that in order for liberty – understood in a strictly individualistic sense – to flourish, the state increasingly took the place of the customs and networks that had traditionally regulated behavour, thus growing – in the name of freedom – ever bigger.

In a traditionally understood concept of identity, each of us is recognised by those around us as those things we are, in the social sphere: a mother, a husband, a writer, a daughter, a good cook, a teller of jokes, etc. Without that social recognition, that echo returning from the Other that says ‘I see you, and yes, I agree with you that you are [that thing you feel you are]’, each person’s inner feeling about who or what she is can be nothing but empty yearning.

But in the radical individualist new world we are entering, each person’s inner feeling of personal identity is not only paramount but the only truth. Interpellation by the other is, we are told, rendered null and void. Only thus can each individual be freed from the oppressive social gaze to flourish as the unique marvel he or she (or ze or hir or whatever) is.

But there’s a catch. If it’s not the people around me who affirm my identity, it has to happen somewhere. So naturally, again, the state steps in. Much as the state stepped in to create government-sanctioned structures intended to replace those stifling social networks and conventions that had hitherto regulated behaviour, here again in the name of freedom the state gets even bigger.

The proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act are as colossal a power grab by the state as the proposal to make organ donation opt-out rather than opt-in. Not only does the state propose to own my physical organs by default, it also proposes to become the ultimate arbiter – over the heads of all those around me and even of observable truth – of whether I am male or female. Not content with inserting itself between individuals and their social spheres, the state must insert itself between us and our very sex, arrogating to itself the right to determine the truth of something which is in fact inscribed in every cell of our bodies.

Secondly, blasphemy. Think I’m joking? Consider this: once the government is established as the final – the only – arbiter of whether I am male or female, then disagreeing with the government’s view that this person or this person or this person are, in fact, women represents an assault on government power. I don’t get to argue with the government about what the rate of income tax is, and if the government says person X is a woman, then they are a woman. Combine that with hate speech rules (which have already shown an alarming degree of mission creep) and you have a situation where refusing to tell lies that have been sanctioned by the state as the truth could land me with a fine or in jail. If that isn’t a de facto blasphemy law I don’t know what is. Indeed in a recent court case where a young trans-identified male, ‘Tara’ Wolf was convicted of assaulting a 60-year-old woman, the judge reduced the fine and declined to award compensation because the victim did not always refer to her male attacker using female pronouns.

To be clear, I don’t really care how people dress or present themselves. I think the world would be a nicer place if we didn’t set quite so much store by whether someone was wearing a frock or makeup or whatever. I’ll even call a man ‘she’ out of politeness, if politeness is warranted. But a dress, hormone supplementation or cosmetic surgery don’t alter someone’s actual sex. The state has no place insisting otherwise. Nor does the state have any place announcing that in fact sex is irrelevant and that to help us be freer it will helpfully supply and manage for each of us a new tailored and oh-so-individual gender identity. But as that awful Breitbart man once said, politics is downstream from culture; the push in our culture continues to be away from the social (relationally understood) toward the radically individualised; I fear many of us will be blaspheming before this phenomenon works itself out.

]]>https://sparrowsandnightingales.com/2018/04/30/dont-care-about-gender-self-id-heres-why-you-should/feed/1sebastianmaryMaster of Eton: trans girls are not really girlshttps://sparrowsandnightingales.com/2017/11/14/master-of-eton-trans-girls-are-not-really-girls/
https://sparrowsandnightingales.com/2017/11/14/master-of-eton-trans-girls-are-not-really-girls/#commentsTue, 14 Nov 2017 14:00:20 +0000http://sparrowsandnightingales.com/?p=1984Continue reading "Master of Eton: trans girls are not really girls"]]>The Master of Eton has announced that should any of his pupils decide to ‘change their gender’ they would be allowed to remain in the school. Now, I’ve met my share of Old Etonians and basis that experience the notion of any current Eton pupil opting to do this seems vanishingly remote. But, says the Master of Eton, if a pupil did he would not be asked to leave the school.

This has been reported by The Guardian as a nice progressive thing. But he also says that Eton has no plans to admit girls. Think about that for a minute. If Eton has no plans to admit girls, but would permit a transgender ‘girl’ to remain at the school, then clearly he considers them to be really boys. Or at least not girls.

I’m not going to do a long rant about male privilege here. But something odd is going on. Trans women seem keen to assert their womanhood in order to insert themselves into women’s changing rooms and other sex-segregated places, but considerably more reluctant to accept a post-transition exclusion from spaces where natal women would not be admitted. Bruce Jenner retains his golf club membership post-transition; the Savile Club in Mayfair has permitted a member to remain despite being in transition to ‘become a woman’. And it appears that the world-class education at Eton, not available to natal girls, is (hypothetically at least) nonetheless available to trans ones.

The ratchet of exclusion, it seems, only works one way. Trans females are 100% genuinely female when it comes to their participation in female spaces, but exceptions are somehow made when the prospect of relinquishing their access to exclusive all-male clubs and societies rears its head. Funny that.

Trans women can’t have it both ways. If Bruce, or the nameless Savile member, or any other male putative ‘woman’ really wants to be a woman, then they should take it for the team and stand down. Accept their exclusion like the natal women they claim they really truly have been all along. Otherwise these august establishments are confirming what women have been saying all along: trans women aren’t really women. If they were, we’d exclude them.

Where is the outrage at this rampant transphobia? Trans activists should be picketing Eton College, Sherwood Country Club and the Savile Club to demand that they treat their transgender members as real women and exclude them. And the fact that this isn’t happening does nothing to dispel the impression natal women are getting, that not even trans women really think they’re women. Not in situations where being a woman might actually have a downside.

The horrors and atrocities of history have been edited out of primary and secondary education except where they can be blamed on racism, sexism, and imperialism — toxins embedded in oppressive outside structures that must be smashed and remade. But the real problem resides in human nature, which religion as well as great art sees as eternally torn by a war between the forces of darkness and light.

]]>https://sparrowsandnightingales.com/2017/11/04/reading-today-camille-paglia-on-sex-crime/feed/0sebastianmaryWhy votes at 16 would be terrible for democracyhttps://sparrowsandnightingales.com/2017/11/03/why-votes-at-16-would-be-terrible-for-democracy/
https://sparrowsandnightingales.com/2017/11/03/why-votes-at-16-would-be-terrible-for-democracy/#commentsFri, 03 Nov 2017 20:11:27 +0000http://sparrowsandnightingales.com/?p=1900Continue reading "Why votes at 16 would be terrible for democracy"]]>I am pleased to see the Conservative Party has used an arcane bit of filibustering to scotch Labour’s latest attempt to extend the franchise to 16-year-olds.

If you look at the people who advocate for votes at 16, they are invariably well-insulated from the consequences of bad politics. Teenagers typically live with their parents and do not pay tax (or certainly the kind of teenager who gets het up about the franchise is unlikely to be already in work and living independently) and as such have relatively little stake in the hard consequences that result from a general election, except at one remove via their parents.

The kind of teenager who gets passionately het up about politics and wants to vote

Along with the kind of teenager who gets passionately het up about politics as a kind of abstract and vehicle for high-minded ideals (see illustrative example above), and who has little skin in the game as he or she does not yet pay tax or incur adult responsibilities, the other kind of voice calling to extend the franchise is a certain kind of career politician. Such people are insulated from the consequences of bad politics by an influential network, a good salary and plenty of job opportunities should he or she be voted out. For career politicians advocating the policy, extending the franchise is either a kind of grandstanding (you could call it attempting to cling to the coattails of the Pankhursts perhaps) or (whisper it) perhaps a cynical attempt to recruit an extra 1.5 million voters with little life experience and, it is presumed, in the main quite left-wing ideals.

The problem is that these two groups busy trying to tamper with the franchise, at little personal cost to themselves, are trivialising it in the process. Voting seems trivial to them, because the outcome of general elections don’t change much for them. But regular adult voters, who pay tax or receive benefits, drive on the roads, have to navigate the healthcare etc etc, voting is one of the few real and substantive levers available to make a meaningful impact on the direction of the country. Extending the franchise to children too young to drive, to end their education legally or to live independently without their parents’ permission would confirm the already pervasive suspicion that no serious decision is ever put to the electorate in case they make the wrong choice. (The EU referendum is the single, wonderful, accidental exception to that rule, for which the political class will never forgive David Cameron.)

In the aftermath of the Brexit vote we have a chance to return politics to the people and away from the stifling consensus that has deadened political engagement since the end of the Cold War. As Sam Hooper puts it

for too long Britain has been run by cautious, unambitious identikit drones who nominally belong to Team Red or Team Blue but ultimately hold the same basic worldview and seek to inch us incrementally toward their shared vision of the future, without even thinking to meaningfully consult with the people or explain their actions.

The electorate rejected that consensus, decisively. In Robert Peston’s words, the electorate threw all the cards up in the air because it was our only chance to do so. We have a chance now to return democracy to something in which voters have an impact – an end to consensus politics, a chance to put all the options back on the table, to return to politics red in tooth and claw. But for that to happen, politics has to be the preserve of grownups. I don’t buy this idea that minors should have a say too, because they will live with the consequences longer. If that were the case, my 14-month-old toddler should also have a vote, and hers should count more than the teenager’s since after all she is going to live with the consequences longer. Right?

No. You have to draw a line, and anyone who has spent any time talking to 16-year-olds (the normal sort, not the sort that makes speeches at Labour Party conferences) knows that even 18 is pushing it and 16 is just silly. Unless, that is, you intend for voting to be a kind of decorative ritual on top of a technocratic politics that continues along the path its mandarins consider best regardless of which team is notionally in power. In that case, it makes very little difference whether teenagers vote or not, because it makes very little difference if any of us do. But if we want to preserve voting as something that can obtain a meaningful result, on topics that matter, it should not be the preserve of children.

]]>https://sparrowsandnightingales.com/2017/11/03/why-votes-at-16-would-be-terrible-for-democracy/feed/1sebastianmary_Ed-and-Ralph-Mili_3296759bWorried about the spread of Islam in the UK? Don’t go to EDL rallies – go to churchhttps://sparrowsandnightingales.com/2017/11/02/worried-about-the-spread-of-islam-in-the-uk-dont-go-to-edl-rallies-go-to-church/
https://sparrowsandnightingales.com/2017/11/02/worried-about-the-spread-of-islam-in-the-uk-dont-go-to-edl-rallies-go-to-church/#respondThu, 02 Nov 2017 20:36:23 +0000http://sparrowsandnightingales.com/?p=1789Continue reading "Worried about the spread of Islam in the UK? Don’t go to EDL rallies – go to church"]]>In which I try and piss off Muslims, liberals, Christians, atheists and people who share Britain First memes

Ahis shifting balance of power has not gone unnoticed. At the ‘deplorable’ end of social media, one sees a great deal of hostility toward what is experienced as a steady encroachment of Islam. Look up the #islamification hashtag if you want a taster. This example is typical.

The officially sanctioned response to this kind of sentiment is to dismiss it as bigotry and then censure, censor and move on. But consider for a few moments what it is expressing. Fear, hostility, concern about the encroachment of a way of life that is ‘not how we do things’. Is it justified? Well, the actual proportion of Muslims to the general population within the United Kingdom is pretty small (around 5%). So why the perception that there are so many?

In a chapter of Skin In The Game, Nassim Taleb outlines the means by which small but highly intransigent minorities can end up dictating dietary and even moral codes for a more flexible majority.

Roman pagans were initially tolerant of Christians, as the tradition was to share gods with other members of the empire. But they wondered why these Nazarenes didn’t want to give and take gods and offer that Jesus fellow to the Roman pantheon in exchange for some other gods. What, our gods aren’t good enough for them? But Christians were intolerant of Roman paganism. The “persecutions” of the Christians had vastly more to do with the intolerance of the Christians for the pantheon and local gods, than the reverse.

Today, some seventy percent of New Zealand lamb is slaughtered using halal methods, because while non-Muslims will for the most part tolerate halal slaughter, a high proportion of Muslims will not tolerate non-halal. Thus, by simple commercial expedience, the less tolerant minority ends up disproportionately influencing the available food choices for the majority.

One can extend this insight beyond halal slaughter. A recent YouGov poll illustrates this: most Brits think only six of the Ten Commandments are still important. The commandments that have fallen by the wayside are: worshiping false idols, taking the Lord’s name in vain, worshiping anything other than God and keeping the Sabbath. In other words, the commandments that relate to active piety specific to religious adherence. The rest deal with theft, murder, adultery and the like; things which are clearly bad whatever you think of God. But edicts against blasphemy and the proliferation of gods, and for loyalty to the faith? Those are the rules that sustain the identity of a religion, and the cohesion of a group that follows it. That these are the edicts we have abandoned, in the UK, tells us everything we need to know about the level of religious intransigence in the general population. The commandments that gatekeep a faith, head off any dalliance with other faiths, in a word keep the faith intolerant enough to be influential have all faded to meaninglessness for the majority of Brits. This is not, in the main, a population willing to dig its heels in for the sake of religious beliefs. Indeed, a recent survey suggests that more than half the UK population do not feel themselves to have a religion.

In the midst of this sea of secular laissez-faire, Muslims are the only faith group present in the UK in any number who take their faith seriously enough to make sacrifices for it. This makes them very visible, and – in a tolerant, pluralistic society – makes Islam disproportionately powerful. British Muslims care about stuff the majority isn’t that bothered about, like saying prayers in slaughterhouses, so their secular fellow countrymen shrug and go along with it because what’s the problem? Those that are bothered, the angry traditionalists tweeting about ‘islamification’, are concerned because they sense, instinctively, the asymmetric influence of an intransigent minority and rightly fear for their own cultural norms.

But the populist reaction – hostility to Muslims and Islam – is misguided. Sharing memes on Twitter decrying the intolerant minority won’t lessen its influence and just makes the meme-sharers look nasty. If those complaining about Islamification are themselves secular, atheist or otherwise indifferent to serious, practising Christianity, they are helping to create the conditions for the Islamification they so detest.

It is no good saying the Muslims should be more tolerant. That’s not how religions work. No: the only force that can counter religious intransigence is religious intransigence. Anyone who is seriously concerned about Islam becoming the dominant religion in the United Kingdom should stop sharing Britain First memes and start going to church. And making sure their family does the same.

I can hear serious Christians protesting that running cultural interference is not a proper reason to attend church and indeed might itself qualify as worshiping graven idols. But is religious oractice not always as much about tribe and belonging and sociocultural norms as a mystical connection with the divine? Meanwhile atheists might protest that their problem is with religions as such, so embracing one imaginary sky fairy in order to see off another imaginary sky fairy is no solution at all. But newsflash, Mr Atheist: your rationalist medicine is weak. People die for religions: no-one would burn at the stake for Richard Dawkins. In the medium to long term, the prognosis does not look good for your freedom to be an atheist unless you pick a sky fairy with a reasonable track record of tolerating dissent. (Spoiler: that’s probably not Islam.)

As for the EDL meme sharers, if you can’t be arsed to educate yourself on your country’s religion, and get yourself out to church once a week, and take it seriously, then you are contributing to a dissolution of your culture that you are unjustly blaming on Muslims, and deserve to see its norms replaced by those of a religion whose adherents can.

Elsewhere I can hear Muslims protesting that this is nasty conspiracy-nutter #islamification clash of civilisations stuff and that I’m a bigot. Joining the chorus, I hear liberal secularists protesting that religion has been responsible for most of the wrongs in human civilisation and having moved mostly away from it in this country it’s barbarous to suggest resiling back into intolerance, especially if one is doing so out of intolerance towards a newer faith. But I am not a bigot. There isn’t a plot to Islamify the UK. There is just Islam, which is a confident faith whose adherents have plenty of intransigence about blasphemy, false gods et cetera, and it is influential because there is nothing substantial in its way. Secularism just doesn’t have the guns to stand against a strongly asserted faith.

In this country we have forgotten the power of faith to move mountains, and thus we do not yet take seriously the potential of a newly arrived faith to move – and replace – the entire post-Christian secular humanist edifice. The greatest error of our secular, pluralistic society has been to assume that the advantages of secular pluralism are both self-evident and historically inevitable (there’s a trace of religiosity right there: it’s all around, if you’re looking). But this is not at all self-evident to me. It seems far more likely to me, considering other civilisations that have gone before, that it is an anomaly and will be succeeded by the advent of a new religious age. We should stop trying to convince ourselves that our much-vaunted secular pluralism is anything but a transitional state for the culture of these islands, and ask ourselves what religion we would like that to be.

“Being “trans” is too easy. It’s an identity picked off a shelf and inside the packaging, there’s a list of other necessary components one must procure before reaching authentic selfhood. “Being trans” to girls like my daughter is like a quest in a video game with each “affirming’ “medical procedure acquired is an “epic win” bringing you one step closer to having all your problems solved. Except no video game exists that suppresses development or leads to the removal of healthy body parts. Being trans isn’t a video game, it’s real life. Real, painful, confusing, life and being trans was the defining aspect not only of identity but also the root of all her suffering.

I supported my child in her journey. What I didn’t do was accept the first and easiest answer. I helped my daughter know that disagreement or unacceptance of any gendered norm was more than okay. I fully supported what my generation quaintly called ‘gender bending” in all ways, but I didn’t agree to let her subject herself to significant bodily harm in an attempt to treat her dysphoria. From the very first announcement, I let her know that she could cut her hair however she wanted, wear whatever clothing she wanted, and use whatever name she chose.

I supported her in her discomfort, to the best of my ability, and I also let her know that discomfort and confusion are legitimate aspects of a meaningful, deeply explored life.”

]]>https://sparrowsandnightingales.com/2017/10/26/reading-today-a-mother-of-a-teenage-trans-desister-goes-public/feed/0sebastianmarySome conservatives are gay – get over it, lefties!https://sparrowsandnightingales.com/2017/10/26/some-conservatives-are-gay-get-over-it-lefties/
https://sparrowsandnightingales.com/2017/10/26/some-conservatives-are-gay-get-over-it-lefties/#respondThu, 26 Oct 2017 12:58:52 +0000http://sparrowsandnightingales.com/?p=1680Continue reading "Some conservatives are gay – get over it, lefties!"]]>It is not the right that conflates sexual orientation with political matters

Far-right parties have […] realized that strategically dangling a few gay people acts as a sort of fundamentalist Febreze that dilutes the stench of their hatred. For example, last month the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD) became the first openly nationalist party to enter the German Bundestag for nearly 60 years. The AfD is co-led by Alice Weidel, who is gay and in a civil partnership with a woman who is reportedly of Sri Lankan descent.

So, extremist policies or not, how on Earth could the AfD be neo-Nazis if they’ve got a gay woman with an ethnically impure wife in charge? In France, the Front National is using similar tactics. According to a February BuzzFeed report, “the [French] National Front now has more high-ranking gay figures than any major party in France, including the Socialists, the center-left party that passed a marriage equality law in 2013”.

Note the phrasing here. The right-wing gay politicians in question have not formed their own views and chosen of their own volition to join AfD or the Front National. No: devoid of autonomy and agency, they are being ‘strategically dangled’ by Machiavellian neo-Nazis, their ascent to high-ranking positions or even leadership within those parties purely a function of the tokenism required to ‘pinkwash’ the otherwise rebarbative doctrines of those parties. (That this is viewed by the article’s left-wing author as self-evident prompts this blog to wonder to what extent the Labour Party simply takes for granted the inability of minorities to succeed without tokenism of this kind. If so, how must that feel to minorities wishing to make an impact on their own merits?)

The phrasing is also illustrative of another rarely questioned left-wing assumption: that left-liberalism is an all-or-nothing game. That is, that if you are untroubled by the existence of gay people, this amiable attitude should by definition extend to all other minorities, including ones we haven’t even thought of yet. Conservative writer Graeme Archer skewers this neatly in Capx:

I worry when any political assertion is used to instruct gay people what to believe. Those who claim transgender identity — the “T” in “LGBT+” — should be treated with dignity. But it is a category error, surely, to place transgenderism and homosexuality in the same bucket. They’re self-evidently not the same thing, and one’s attitude to the former can’t be a function of one’s status regarding the latter.

Consequences flow from this error. By eliding homosexuality with “any sexual minority, regardless of whether or not they’re gay” we allow the Left to own the very definition of gay people’s being. We turn a personal act of liberation (gay pride) into just another prescriptive set of Left-wing policies (commitment to “diversity”).

I wrote the other day about how the ever-expanding umbrella of minorities embraced by left-wing ‘diversity’ has gradually inched the acceptable field of minority campaign demands from focused civil rights matters to something more like a plaintive clamour for narcissistic strokes:

The left-wing assumption is that minorities will desire this state. That, purely by virtue of belonging to a minority, gay people (or any other kind of minority) must of course hanker for ‘debt points’, and wish to enter the economy and hierarchy of guilt and debt that Mitchell’s essay captures so neatly. Identity, he writes

carries a determination about guilt or innocence that nothing can appreciably alter. Its guilt is guilt without atonement; its innocence is innocence without fault. No redemption is possible, but only a schema of never-ending debts and payments. Second, this schema is made possible because identity politics is, tacitly or expressly, a relationship—something quite different from sorting (and self-sorting) by kinds. In the identity-politics world, the further your distance from the epicenter of guilt, the more debt points you receive.

The outrage Madhawi expresses at the notion that some gay people might disagree with her bright assumption that she can dictate their political views based on their minority status is, at root, not grounded in sorrow at the unpalatability of their dissenting views but anger at these individuals’ refusal to play the game. Cash in your debt points, dammit! And if you won’t, we will excommunicate you as white, male and wealthy, and re-site you close enough to the epicenter of guilt and thus free ourselves from worrying about your minority status.

This is an error. For once you disaggregate the happy rainbow of minorities under the diversity umbrella, it is plain as a pikestaff that the interests of different groups do not necessarily align and, in many cases, are actively in conflict. Nowhere in the article, for example, does she address the (to me pretty self-evident) probability that gay people are joining anti-immigration parties across Europe in high numbers not because they are helpless to resist the siren call of pink-washing neo-Nazis, but because they are concerned (justifiably, as Douglas Murray frequently points out) at the large-scale importation of sometimes violent homophobia from the Muslim world.

Once upon a time, to campaign for gay rights more or less forced individuals into the arms of the Left, as the Right often took a socially conservative stance that was not welcoming to gay people. Times have changed, thank goodness. Gay people have protections in law from discrimination and UK society at large is not hostile to same-sex relationships as was once the case. We should be celebrating the participation of gay people across the political spectrum as evidence of this thoroughgoing change. But the left, jealous of the territory it has annexed and reluctant to free people it considers ‘rightfully ours’ to exercise their own judgement in political matters, still persists in muddling sexual orientation with political orientation, and stubbornly refuses to get over the fact that gay people are individuals, not ciphers for tokenism – and yes, some of them are conservative.